Present participle of edifice (archaic); the act of building or constructing, or metaphorically, building up knowledge and virtue.
From the verb edifice, which derives from Latin edificare. Though edifice became primarily a noun in English, edificing preserves the gerund form showing how the word was once commonly used as an active verb.
Edificing is essentially a ghost word—it appears in old texts but feels completely foreign to modern speakers because we stopped using edifice as a verb centuries ago, yet the word form lingers like a linguistic fossil.
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